Ever since the 1860s when photographers travelled the American West and brought photographs of scenic wonders back to the people on the East Coast of America we have had a North American tradition of landscape photography used for the environment.
Today, I'm very careful not to mention very specific locations when I write or give captions.
The combination of pictures and words together can be really effective, and I began to realise in my career that unless I wrote my own words, then my message was diluted.
There is no question that photography has played a major role in the environmental movement.
The reason that I keep writing is that all my most powerful messages about the fates of wild places that I care about need to have words as well as images.
I began to realise that film sees the world differently than the human eye, and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.
When we tune in to an especially human way of viewing the landscape powerfully, it resonates with an audience.
The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I'm searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible.
My mountaineering skills are not important to my best photographs, but they do add a component to my work that is definitely a bit different than that of most photographers.
I remember when an editor at the National Geographic promised to run about a dozen of my landscape pictures from a story on the John Muir trail as an essay, but when the group of editors got together, someone said that my pictures looked like postcards.
I think landscape photography in general is somewhat undervalued.
I began taking pictures in the natural world to be able to show people what I was experiencing when I climbed and explored in Yosemite in the High Sierra.
A lot of people think that when you have grand scenery, such as you have in Yosemite, that photography must be easy.
